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From: petrilli@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Chris Petrilli)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: 1.6 mb diskettes
Message-ID: <33514@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jul 90 16:29:31 GMT
References: <1990Jul1.160835.19622@xrtll.uucp>
Sender: news@ut-emx.UUCP
Reply-To: petrilli@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Chris Petrilli)
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
Lines: 28

In article <1990Jul1.160835.19622@xrtll.uucp> silver@xrtll.UUCP (Hi Ho Silver) writes:
>   One other note:  if you have double-density media (360K or 720K), it
>is possible to format these as if they were high-density.  While you will
>find a lot of sectors are reported as bad (particularly on the inner
>tracks), this will usually provide a diskette with higher-than-normal
>storage (typically it provides 800K on a 360K diskette).  But you can't
>trust these diskettes; try it with some information you don't need and
>you'll find an alarming number of errors.  While I would trust a diskette
>formatted with a program like you mention above somewhat more than that,
>I still wouldn't use it for any important information, nor would I use
>it on more than one system (for reasons including the possibility of
>needing a driver, and the minor differences between disk drives that mean
>one may read it while another may not).  Just my opinion, though.

I have found that formatting 360K disks as a quad-density (720K) disk is 
very reliable, and I have backed up many a machine on to these.  Every
time I have treied to use the 1.2M format, it has failed to last any amount
of time (because of the magnetic media), and has never correctly re-formated
to a 360K again after than w/o errors as it did before.   FastBack and many
other backup programs will format 360K disks to 720K in a 1.2M drive and 
it DOES NOT require a driver to use.  It is a standard DOS format that is 
completely understandable.

+ Chris Petrilli                                    "Opinons represented here
| University of Texas at Austin                      do not necessarily
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